


recognitions and recollections

by Darksabre4237



Category: Lovecraft Country
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Leti and her bat, Leti is thirsty, Multi, The Bat - Freeform, Tic is fine, angel wings wink wink, baby! Leti, baby! Tic, two silly idiots in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:55:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26399782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darksabre4237/pseuds/Darksabre4237
Summary: Leti Lewis hops off the stage after her duet with her sister and sees someone familiar...sending her down memory lane...and possibly towards her future.
Relationships: Leti Lewis/Tic Freeman, Leti/Tic, Letitia Lewis/Atticus Freeman
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	recognitions and recollections

**Author's Note:**

> So....I am deeply obsessed with HBO's Lovecraft Country and I am hopelessly in love with the pairing of Leti Lewis and Tic Freeman. In my mind, Leti has had a thing for Tic since their high school days but I was curious as to how they met so I decided to try my hand at writing my head-canon for how these two idiots came to be friends. 
> 
> Trigger Warning for some references to sex work/slut-shaming and racial slurs...

It takes her a _long_ moment to recognize him.

Leti Lewis, drifter, photographer, and civil rights activist (her sister and brother, if asked, would just describe her as a _professional_ _fuckup_ though—one with a face pretty enough and feet fast enough to get her out of most scrapes) steps lightly off the stage, sweating in the sticky Chicago summer evening air. The danceable tune of “Whole Lotta Shakin” rings in her ears; her heart flutters with the uniquely intoxicating excitement of being on stage—the same excitement that, years ago, had kept her in the church choir long after she had grown weary of the sermons.

Leti scans the crowd, drinking in the sight of her people—her beautiful, dignified, and defiant and yet so cruelly oppressed people—and then, someone who looks almost familiar catches her eye. A young man, heavily muscled, bare chest and back slick and gleaming with water from the gushing hydrant, his brown skin kissed by the dim light of the streetlamps, laughing as he chases other youths through the water. Leti feels an odd moment of disorientation and then, the way his lips curl upward sends a jolt through her and she nearly stumbles.

Leti prides herself on being agile, quick and smooth on her feet— _moves like a cat, that nigger bitch—_ she’d once heard a white man say as she hid behind a garbage bin, heart pounding as she listened to the man give a report of a woman who had been _taking photos at one of them ruckuses those colored folk who don’t know their place are always making_. It’s a talent that’s served her well more than once during her travels, but the sight of Atticus Freeman is enough to make her take a step—albeit a tiny one—to steady herself.

She remembers Atticus—no, _Tic_ , as _distinctly_ awkward. All skinny legs and arms, warm, intelligent brown eyes behind thick glasses, nose always in a book, too earnest and too smart for his own good. _A strange child_ , the adults always said, but Leti had liked him since the day she’d found him fruitlessly attempting to defend himself from a hail of blows being delivered by the neighborhood bully Seymour....

_She doesn’t really think it through._

_It’s just - something about the sight of Atticus Freeman holding on to his stack of books for dear life and ducking Seymour’s blows arouses a fierce, righteous rage in her. Without thinking, the nine-year-old drops her satchel, seizes up the bat Seymour discarded in his eagerness to engage in a bit of needless cruelty, and - savoring its solidity in her hand, she rushes at Tree with it. “Leave him alone!” she yells, and punctuates her directive by whacking the bat across Tree’s back with considerable force._

_Seymour howls, spinning around to see who dares assault him, fists ready to fly, and stops short when he sees little Leti Lewis, curls pulled away from her flushed face by bright ribbons, fiercely gripping the bat in sweaty hands, brown eyes aflame. “What you do that for?” he shouts, half in anger and half in disbelief that this diminutive girl dares challenge his right to bully._

_“Leave him alone!” Leti repeats, stomping her foot._

_“Or what?” Seymour taunts. His upper lip curls. “You’ll run and tell your mama?” An ugly look crosses his face. “Everybody knows your mama’s a whore, you know that? And my mama says you gon’ end up just like her, some little high yellow mulatto turning tricks for—”_

_Leti doesn’t let him finish the sentence. Planting her back foot the way she’s seen batters do on the baseball diamond, she winds up and delivers a mighty blow to Seymour’s knee. Yowling, he buckles, holding his leg. Leti sneers in triumph. “Why don’t you go run and tell_ your _mama you were just beaten up_ by a girl _?”_

_Leti approaches and kicks him in the kidneys for good measure, enjoying the squeal Seymour produces, and then stomps past him to where Atticus stares at the scene before him in disbelief. The skinny boy’s shirt is torn and dirty, his glasses askew, his precious books scattered on the ground, and it makes Leti’s heart ache._

_Without a word, Leti drops down next to him and begins helping him gather up his scattered books and papers. She and Tic have never really talked outside of their mamas making them say hello to each other before Sunday School, but she’s always liked him, for some reason. He’s quiet and doesn’t make trouble or try to pull girls’ hair or steal their ribbons like the other boys. She’s overheard some of the men at church saying Montrose Freeman’s son is a sissy because all he likes to do was read, and such comments have never sat well with her. So what if Tic wanted to read? Reading was a good deal better than all the foolishness and nonsense most of the other boys his age got up to._

_A heavy grunt punctuates her thoughts as Seymour stumbles to his feet. He stands and makes as if to come towards the two, but Leti glares at him and he seems to think better of it. “I’m gonna get even with you, Freeman,” he says, shaking his fist in Tic’s direction. “You and your wild lil’ mulatto girl,” he turns, scoops up his bat, and limps away._

_“What did you do that for?” Tic asks softly, after Seymour disappears around the corner of the alley, “You could’ve gotten in trouble.”_

_“Couldn’t just let him hit you,” Leti replies shortly as she hands the last book to Tic. She glances at his dirty shirt, spying old bruises on his arms through the holes. “He was beating you something fierce.”_

_Tic shrugged his thin shoulders. “Ain’t nothing I ain’t already used to,” he says, sounding resigned._

_“What do you mean?” Leti asked._

_Tic gives her a grim smile. “My pops whoops me all the time. I can take a hit. But you—”_

_“If you say_ because you’re a girl _, I’ll smack_ you _, Atticus Freeman,” Leti cuts him off._

_Atticus frowns, his eyes brimming with earnesty behind his thick glasses. “I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say I don’t want you getting hurt.”_

I don’t want you getting hurt _. For some reason, the words - and the sincere honesty she could_ feel _was behind them, makes Leti look downward. Sometimes, she feels as if no one in the world cares whether she gets hurt or not. Not her mama, who runs off with different men all the time and leaves Leti to do all her own cooking, cleaning, and mending, not Marvin who spends all his time with his father on the farm far away and never writes home anymore, and not even Ruby. Leti knows in her heart it’s not fair to think Ruby doesn’t care about her, but ever since Ruby moved out two years ago to become a live-in maid uptown it seems as if her sister is too preoccupied with other things to care how Leti is getting along. Pretty much the only time Leti sees Ruby anymore is when they sing in church, and right after the service Ruby has to catch the bus to go back uptown to wait on the fancy white folks she works for. Nobody seemed to care about_ just _Leti._

_Leti shrugs, somewhat discomfited by the strength of emotion the simple comment aroused in her. “I’ll be fine, Atticus Freeman. Worry about your own self.”_

_“Tic,” Atticus blurts out, and then looks almost surprised at himself. He glances at her shyly, adjusting his glasses nervously. “Tic - I mean, that’s what Uncle George calls me. And Aunt Hippolyta. You can call me Tic if, if you want, Miss Letitia.”_

_Leti grins. “Well,_ Tic _, nobody calls me Letitia. ‘Cept my mama, and she doesn’t count. My name’s_ Leti _.”_

They walk back to their block that day in comfortable silence, and that is the beginning of their friendship. The next day at school Leti marches up to Tic to ask him what he’s reading, and he ends up loaning her one of his books. She loves the story, and borrows several of his books to read as the months go by. She finds that she loves immersing herself in imaginary worlds almost as much as he does, and Tic’s books help her get through those lonely nights when her mother doesn’t come home or help her block out the noise of what her mother does with the drunken men who sometimes stumble into their apartment after dark.

During their first year of high school, Tic forms the Southside Futurists Science Fiction Club. He comes specifically to Leti to ask her to join. She ends up being the only girl member, but the other boys all treat her with respect. Somehow, without him ever saying so, Leti _knows_ Tic will immediately kick out of the club any boy who disrespects her, and the fact that her skinny, bookish friend would erect such a barrier of protection around her warms her heart. Secretly, Leti hopes throughout their high school years that Tic will ask her to be his girl (she certainly gets more than enough offers from other boys) - but his feelings for her never seem to go beyond friendship - if friendship is enough of a word to describe the fierce loyalty and protectiveness she’d first glimpsed when he, battered and bruised, had looked at her and said, “ _I don’t want you getting hurt_.”

Tic joins the army immediately after graduation, and it is then that Leti resigns herself to the fact that Tic will never make a move on her—ever. She thinks about going to see him before he leaves, maybe _saying something_ , but Leti knows enough families whose boys didn’t come home from the terrible war in Europe to understand the stupidity of getting attached to a man who is going off to fight. Everybody leaves her eventually anyway - there is no reason she should ever have assumed Tic would be around forever.

(Stupidly, she’s always hoped he would be the one who _stays_.)

But Atticus Freeman makes plans to leave too—because _everybody leaves Leti Lewis_. The father who she’s never met, her brother, her mother, even steady, defiant Ruby.

And now Tic.

So she doesn’t tell him goodbye, doesn’t offer to write, and Tic Freeman disappears from her life. Silently, and apparently, permanently. 

Sometimes though, in the years after, she’ll be in a bookstore or at a library, and she’ll remember a skinny little boy, wearing glasses, with a knapsack containing far too many books for his thin shoulders to be hauling. And she’ll wonder…

And now here he is, back, in the flesh, like some sort of miracle. Robust, tall, heavily and gloriously muscled like an ebony Greek god. Laughing. Handsome.

_Too_ handsome.

“Who’s that?” Leti asks, hoping her voice didn’t sound breathless.

“Who, Tic?” Ruby asks, dryly, barely glancing at the boy who’d stolen Leti’s heart in an alleyway so many years ago.

“That’s Tic?” Leti repeats, as if she needs confirmation. “Skinny, glasses kid who’s too smart for his own good, Tic?”

“Yeah,” Ruby replies, flatly. “He grew up.”

_Grew up is an understatement_ , Leti thinks to herself, before putting aside the thought of her now ridiculously handsome childhood friend to negotiate herself a place to sleep for the night.

Later that night, Leti lies in the pallet Ruby’s fixed up for her on the floor, trying to block out the noise of her neighbors screaming at one another in the next apartment over, struggling to sleep. Almost unbidden, her thoughts turn to the sight of Atticus’s naked back, and she feels her cheeks warm. “A feast for the eyes”—that’s what her horrid, vain, selfish, whoring mother would have called him, and Leti shoves thoughts of her mother away. The term fits though, and Leti suddenly wonders what it would be like to run her hands over his firm, defined abdomen, to dig her fingers into the solidity of his back. There has always been a _settledness_ to Tic, as if there is a granite plinth at the center of him nothing can touch. It appeals to her, the eternal drifter, the ghost girl who can never find a place to haunt.

Tic—she hasn’t seen Tic in five years. He hadn’t come back to Chicago after the war ended - off somewhere in Florida, George Freeman told her the last time she’d been in town, which was a year ago. It is odd that the thought of him should still appeal to her so much, even after half a decade and a thousand adventures, a thousand overtures from other men, some which she had accepted and others that she had not. Not that she’s ever gone all the way with _any_ of them. She is no prude and has long since abandoned the stiff ways of her church upbringing - her mother was a faithful church-goer and yet still a liar, a cheat, a whore, and a _terrible_ mother - but Leti has always envisioned her first time with someone more... _solid_ than the flighty revolutionary sorts she meets on the road and less... _confining_ than the “proper” black men who see her beauty and want to make a prize trophy out of her.

_You ask too much, Leti Lewis,_ the reproof comes in her sister’s voice. A man who’ll let you run free but also protect you? Leti almost snorts to herself. Such men are rare, and a _fuckup_ like her is unlikely to snag one.

But Tic…

_Ah, fuck it._ He is back in town, she is back in town, there is no reason _not_ to go check up on her old friend and see what three years in the army have done to him. Besides muscling him up, that is. Perhaps he’s become a pompous, self-important ass like Seymour, now that girls are definitely all over him. Maybe he’s even messing with white girls, like she knew some of the colored men do if they think they can get away with it without being lynched. The thought of Tic with a white woman brings a grimace to her face, and she forces herself to bury the thought.

_Just a friendly meeting, nothing else._ To see if his character has changed as much as his body has. And then, and then—she’ll make plans for where to go next. Find a job, or something. Even though that little sense inside her that always tells her where to steer when on the road tells her it won’t be as easy as finding a job in some store downtown and settling into a boarding house.

“Leti, if you don’t quit that tossing and turning I’ll turn you out tonight and not two days from now,” Ruby’s voice cuts into her thoughts, and Leti realizes belatedly that she has been rolling back and forth for the past twenty minutes. “I’d think, what with you being on the road sleeping God knows where, you’d be thankful for a real bed for once.”

“This pallet ain’t no goose feather bed,” Leti retorts, but forces herself to stay still as Ruby huffs. Still and silent, like she does when she’s hiding from the cops or a mob after yet another close call at a sit-in or a protest.

Ruby’s breathing eventually grows deep and even, and Leti, in the privacy afforded her by knowing her sister is asleep, caves and allows herself to drift back to the old fantasy she used to entertain back in high school when she had a crush on Tic. A fantasy of walking down the Magnificent Mile at dusk with the streetlamps shining bright around them, Tic’s arm warm around her shoulder. Protected, cared about... _safe._

It is a pleasant thought, and with that image on her mind and a smile on her face, Leti Lewis finally drifts off to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, there you have it! Please do leave feedback if you so desire. Whatever you might think, I think we can all agree Tic x Leti forever, amirite? No, I will not be taking questions as to whether these two are in love at this time. If you can't see they are IN LOVE, you need to see the eye doctor. 
> 
> *cartwheels away to the tune of 'Take It Back'*


End file.
